The first TEN registrants will receive 10% off their full class registration (select Early Bird discount during registration)Classes start next week!

CHRISTMAS SALES!!

1-Purchase a hard-copy CD or instructional book and receive a FREE digital copy. This way, you can give the physical copy away as a Christmas present, while still enjoying the digital version for yourself.

Visit My Store to purchase books and CDs. After you have completed your purchase, email your receipt to erin@erinmaemusic.com and I will email back your FREE digital download of the same title(s).

2- Prepay for 6 private lessons and receive the 7th lesson free. Gift cards available upon request. The lesson recipient will have one year to use the lessons.

Private lessons are $40/hour and are offered both online and in-person in Wichita, KS. Learn more about lessons by visiting My Website. To prepay for six lessons and get the seventh FREE, use this link: Paypal.me. I will email you with details, send gift cards, and set up the first lesson as soon as your payment processes.

**These sales are good through December 31st, 2018… for the early shoppers and the procrastinators too! 🙂 **

Since appearing on the cover of Dulcimer Players News in 2002 (see above), Steve has been writing articles to share what he has learned with the dulcimer community.

Dulcimersessions.com was a website hosted by Mel Bay Publications and was coordinated and edited by Lois Hornbostel. Sadly, the website is no longer hosted and all of the resources published there are lost to the bits and bytes of time in the internet age.

Tam Kearney was a mainstay in the Toronto folk music scene after growing up in Glasgow and then moving to Canada in the 1960s. Unfortunately for us, he passed in 2013. (Read Ian Robb‘s eulogy in SingOut! Magazine here.)

I was on tour in Toronto in March of 2017 and was able to play a house concert for Lynn Westerhout, Tam’s spouse, and she allowed me to borrow and play on (2) of his hand-crafter instruments for the concert and the day of workshops the following day.

Your Thanksgiving dinner will not be complete without sharing these jokes!

What kind of music did the Pilgrims like? Plymouth Rock!Why did the guys let the sweet potato join the band? So they could have a yam session!What is the most musical part of the turkey? The drumsticks!

Have a Blessed Thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving, I have almost too many blessings to count. Being able to work with all of you who love dulcimers, and having the opportunity to share my thoughts about dulcimering every week, are definitely two of them. We appreciate the friendship and confidence you have shown in us by connecting with Dulcimer Crossing. Steve and I send our heartfelt Thanksgiving wishes across the miles from our houses to yours. May your homes be filled with laughter, happiness, and (of course) lots of dulcimer music.

How to Care for Your Instrument in Cold Weather

With the weather turning colder, have you noticed a dramatic change in your dulcimer’s tuning? Well, a stringed instrument is a living thing. Since it is made out of organic materials, the woods, strings, and glues used when it was built interact with the atmosphere around them. And while these materials certainly work together to create beautiful music, they are also responsible for the reason that stringed instruments go out of tune, especially with sudden temperature changes. Try to keep the temperature constant in the room(s) where you store your instruments.

Likewise, humidity will affect your dulcimers. Wood gains and loses moisture until it’s in sync with the air around it. When the air is humid, a piece of wood will swell as it gains moisture. When the air is dry, the wood will shrink as it loses moisture. This process happens fairly quickly with thin pieces of wood, such as dulcimer soundboards and backs, and if they get too dry, they can crack.

If you have started running the furnace already, the climate in the house may have become very dry. The widely accepted safe range for wooden musical instruments is between about 40% and 60% relative humidity. The only way to know if you’re in that range is to measure it by keeping a hygrometer near your instrument. (I found inexpensive ones on Amazon.) Also, I suggest that you consider purchasing a room and/or case humidifier for the good health of your precious instruments.

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask Steve or myself.

Vi Wickam has created a new Fiddle Lesson for the Scottish tune Miss McLeod’s Reel. that he and I like to play in our duo Fiddle Whamdiddle. I have already created a mountain dulcimer lesson in the Galax style for this tune on DulcimerCrossing here.

You can also watch a couple of versions of this tune below:

Steve & Vi playing a hammered dulcimer and fiddle duet at the former Caffe Olé in Fort Collins, Colorado: (under the title “Have You Ever Gone to Meeting, Uncle Joe?” filmed for Vi’s Fiddle-Tune-A-Day project in 2012.)

And Steve playing Galax style with Vi and another DulcimerCrossing teacher, Don Pedi, at a house concert at Steve’s former home in Fort Collins, Colorado.

As always, you can become a subscriber at DulcimerCrossing.com and have complete 24/7 access to all of our lessons!

Thanks to Geoff Reeve-Black, I was also able to see some historic mountain dulcimers from his collection that I am pleased to show to you here:

This one was built by Edd Presnell from North Carolina. Some people find the traditional wooden tuning pegs to be a challenge (and a chore!) but these operated smoothly, AND accurately, even though I was coaxing the instrument into a couple of different tunings.

The second instrument was built by Sam Carrell of Tennessee. Like the Presnell dulcimer, this one also had friction pegs, but has the classic “fiddle” shape that Mike Clemmer also builds with in Townsend, Tennessee. Like Mike’s, this one is also built to be strung as a 5-string instrument, but Geoff had it set up as a 4 equi-distant string instrument.

As I took the photo of Geoff, holding the Presnell dulcimer above, he quipped: “Ah, a photo of two fossils.”

That makes me one grateful dulcimer paleontologist for sure!

And here is a view of our multi-instrument jam in the Lawnside Room on the first night! (This was just a harbinger of all the good music shared throughout the weekend.)

And this photo is the clear evidence that this dulcimer festival was taking place in England. Where tea (and coffee) were served twice a day, and after tea-time, the bar opened for the rest of the evening, throughout dinner and the evening jam session.